The tunnel boring machines started cutting through Hudson River bedrock this week — the first new rail tunnels dug under the river since 1910.
Governor Hochul marked the start of boring on the Gateway Hudson Tunnel Project in person, according to her office's own release. This is the excavation phase of the $16 billion-plus program to build two new Amtrak/NJ Transit tunnels alongside the century-old North River Tunnels, which have been running on patched-together repairs since Sandy flooded them with saltwater in 2012.
The scale here is worth sitting with: two tunnel boring machines will grind roughly 3.5 miles under the river and under Manhattan's West Side before this phase wraps. That's years of continuous below-grade excavation work, followed by lining, systems, and track — a pipeline of heavy civil and specialty trade work that runs long after the machines finish their bore.
For contractors, the boring milestone itself isn't a bid opportunity — the civil contracts for this phase were let years ago. But it's the clearest signal yet that the program is real and moving, not stuck in the environmental-review purgatory that's swallowed other megaprojects. The next tranche of Gateway work — systems integration, the Manhattan-side tunnel connections, eventually the Portal North and Portal South approach work on the Jersey side — is what should be on your radar now if you're a heavy-civil or MEP shop that wants in on the next procurement window.
Track the Gateway Development Commission's own procurement portal for what comes after excavation. A program this size doesn't let all its work in one bid — it lets it in waves, and the wave after tunnel boring is usually where mid-size specialty trades get their shot.
First reported by Gothamist, which covered the tunnel launch from the site.